Studs Terkel Quotes

I'm a writer obsessed with remembering: with remembering the past of America above all - and above all, that of Latin America, intimate land condemned to forgetfulness.

Stories are one of the means by which a culture preserves its identity.

The world that birthed that story is long gone, all its people are dead, but it continues to touch the present and future because someone cared enough about that world to keep it. To put it in words. To remember it.

My work is as an ethnographic rescuer: a conduit between past and future generations. The urgency of this effort cannot be overstated.

We forget all too soon the things we thought we could never forget.

Tradition does not mean that the living are dead, it means that the dead are living.

History is information. Memory is part of your identity.

Without memory, there is no culture. Without memory, there would be no civilization, no society, no future.

Societies perish when people forget where they come from.

The control of the past depends above all on the training of memory

History takes time... History makes memory.

I like places that have history in the sense of - you feel responsible to it.

Without oblivion, there is no remembrance possible. When both oblivion and memory are wise, when the general soul of man is clear, melodious, true, there may come a modern Iliad as memorial of the Past.

There's rosemary, that's for remembrance. Pray you, love, remember.

Stories have to be told or they die, and when they die, we can't remember who we are or why we're here.

Remember Old Nan's stories, Bran. Remember the way she told them, the sound of her voice. So long as you do that, part of her will always be alive in you.

We have to remember everything. If we don't, by the time we grow up it'll be gone forever.

Memory and poetry go together, absolutely. It is a matter of preserving and of remembering things.

Language also encodes our past. We want to know who we are. To know who we are, we have to know who we used to be. Consequently, our literature, written in the past, anchors us in that past.

Writers are historians, too. It is in literature that the greater truths about a people and their past are found.

For a long time, I've been interested in cultural memory and historical erasure.

Myths are part of our DNA. We're a civilisation with a continuous culture. The effort to modernize it keeps it alive. Readers connect with it.

Never, ever forget history.

Concepts, like individuals, have their histories and are just as incapable of withstanding the ravages of time as are individuals. But in and through all this they retain a kind of homesickness for the scenes of their childhood.

When the written and spoken word is censored, the urban landscape becomes a nation's only physical link to the past.